4 months ago
The Nintendo Wii has never been a platform that screams out to hardcore gamers, though it's not for a lack of trying. Well, maybe it is. Regardless, game developer Deep Silver gave it a go with their survival/horror game Cursed Mountain. It's really not that bad...for a Wii game - and THAT is the qualifier to that statement.
The somewhat eerie atmospheres that your mountain-climbing character explores looks pretty good, the ghoulish enemies come out pretty well, and the controls are (overall) not too shabby. Again, that's for a Wii game. If this game was on one of the big-boy systems, it wouldn't be very good at all. Then again, if it WAS on one of the big boys it would probably have a better overall presentation. But Cursed Mountain isn't on one of the next-gen consoles, it's on the Wii.
Being that it's on the Wii, Cursed Mountain (of course) has Wii-esque controls. Use the nunchuck to move your character about while having most of the other controls on the Wii remote. In fact, movement aside all but two controls are on the Wii remote. And the two that aren't (run and "third eye") make perfect sense on the nunchuck. Button placement makes perfect sense in Cursed Mountain, but execution isn't quite there as some actions seem a bit sluggish. This is especially noticable in combat.
While on the subject of combat, it seems rather stiff and clumbsy. You have a few options as far as how to attack such as swinging your enchanted ice-pick at the ghosts or shooting at them while in "third-eye" mode. To finish of the phantasmal foes, you perform a ritual by targeting the seal on them when they're near death and performing the on-screen motions with your Wii remote and nunchuck. While everything sounds fairly easy to accomplish, the sluggish control response will be your demise and you'll find that anything much more than a basic "fair-fight" will end in a game-over screen.
Cursed Mountain's storyline isn't too bad, however, as the basic plot is enough to make someone at least mildly interested. The Reader's Digest version is that you and your younger brother Frank are professional mountain climbers. Frank took a job to climb a sacred mountain in the Himalayas but is never seen from or heard from again. Being the caring older brother, you set off after him only to find that an uncanny aura of death and decay has overtaken the crag and all around it. It's a fairly eerie setting and theme that does a good job at conveying a sense of suspense as if something horrible might happen at any time. Sometimes it almost does.
There are mini-cutscenes that suddenly inturrupt gameplay, and they're designed to do so. They pop up quickly as to startle you and get your heart beating hard in your chest, though they rarely ever do so. Then again, I'm sure that if you were to play this game alone in a dark room you'd get spooked more often that I did since I played it in a well-lit living room with windows and lights (I don't like scary things). Then again, I never got a real sense of scariness with Cursed Mountain. The original Silent Hill game, however, that was a different story.
So, to digress back to the original point, Cursed Mountain isn't a bad attempt at making a Wii game for a hardcore audience. Just keep in mind that when it comes down to it, it's still a Wii game.
Final Game Guys grade: C+
- Game Guy Barry White bcwhite@news10.net
News10/KXTV
